We just wanted to make a song that felt like real hype, something that when people heard it, they’d go ‘oh shit!’

We were kind of stuck on a track, procrastinating, and I didn’t feel like we’d written the first single yet, you know, a really banging song, so I said to Aaron, ‘have you got anything else, bro?’ and he was like, ‘funny you should ask, I’ve got this one new thing …’ It was this bluesy sample of a woman singing – she’s a Catholic nun, who apparently thought she was the Bride of Christ. I think he’d heard the sample in a movie soundtrack or something, and he just made this really cool beat.

So I was thinking, ‘this is trippy, this is interesting, what were you thinking about when you wrote that?’ And he was just like, ‘I was thinking about being a runaway slave’, I guess because it was right around the time Django Unchained came out, but that gave me some really strong images in my head.

We laid it down, and the rhythm of the verse [I was writing for a different collaboration] just fit perfectly in the pocket of the beat, you know, that ‘they ain’t got no hustle, no muscle, no backbone …’ It was just one of those meant to be moments.

via NZ Herald

[The location the video was filmed at is an] area in the Far North of New Zealand, and [St. Gabriel’s Cathedral] is where the first Christian missionaries settled when they first came over. That was actually the first church they built in that area. On top of that, the location itself is stunning. We wanted a small, rural feel [for the video]. When Tom Gould, the director, heard “Runnin’,” he said, ‘It’s got this rustic feel. I want to take the religious iconography that’s in the sample, but I want to put it in a New Zealand context.’

via HipHopDX